Sam Desocio thinks the shelf life of Tim Keller and urban ministry may have expired. For one thing, the reasons for doing urban ministry that motivated Keller in the 1990s are now mainstream, tired and maybe even trite:
As a church planter I often have the opportunity to spend time with other ministry leaders and church planters. Among most of them I don’t see the assumed disgust for the city which Dr. Keller uses as a sparring partner. While many of them are in rural or suburban locations, almost all see urban ministry as vital. In fact, When I talk to current or hopeful church planters, urban ministry is undeniably given preeminence. I was once meeting with a church planter making plans for a move to a new city. He shared with me that he had a small scattering of people interested in working alongside him. Some of these folks were in the suburbs on one side of town, while others, were in the suburbs on the other side of the town. So, I asked him what area he was considering, (someplace close to one of those two areas I assumed). He answered that he was “called to the city”, and so the folks in both areas would have to be willing to move or come closer to him. I really liked this guy, but he had recently moved to his city, and –from what I could tell–expected longstanding residents to move away from existing relationships to pursue his vision of relevancy (maybe it was Christianity’s relevancy, but maybe it was his own).
Of course this is a subjective estimate of the prioritization of urban planting. So lets look at the stats coming from within the PCA. Six of the ten churches organized in the PCA in 2012(the most recent stats) were in cities with populations over 100,000. Of the over 40 church planters placed on the field by the PCA in that same year: 21 were in cities of over 100,000. Nine were in cities between 100,000 and 50,000. Only 12 were in cities below 50,000. A glance at the Acts 29 Network (also admittedly influenced by Dr. Keller) shows that only one of the last ten churches in that network where planted in cities with populations less than 100,000.
For another, Keller’s call to urban ministry may distort Scripture:
Dr. Keller’s argument for cities pushes too much of the Bible through an artificial urban rubric. This rubric down plays Paul’s ministry in the country side of Lycaonia. It tables Jesus’s pursuit of the one at the expense of the 99. I don’t bring this up to argue that Jesus didn’t care about Jerusalem, of course he wept over that city. Its clear that Paul care about major cities in the Roman empire, but it is impossible to boil down the locations of Paul’s ministry to one easy framework. We could ask: if Paul’s strategy was to go “into the largest cities of the region”, then why did he travel to Lystra several times, while there is no mention of any time spent in Smyrna (Population 90,000) or the even larger Sardis (Population 100,000).
Dr. Keller’s prioritization of important places, potential swells beyond population and ends up reinforcing a view of the world which esteems significance as the highest good.
Instead of challenging the cultures views of importance, Dr. Keller seems to be reinforcing them.
Good thing Sam doesn’t blog at Gospel Coalition.
Old Life 